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How To Talk To Other Parents About Conflict Between Children
I am a successful businesswoman. I am a successful entrepreneur. I am a successful psychotherapist. And yet, in talking to other parents about conflict between my children and theirs, I frequently feel like a failure. Why is this such a challenge, and not just for me, but for most parents I speak to? How and…
Social Comparison: How Do I Stack Up?
Living in San Francisco in 2016 is enough to make the most well-adjusted individual grapple with inadequacy. If you look around, you are likely to see many highly educated, successful, productive and intelligent people. These folks seem to have it all: money, fitness and health, attractiveness, successful careers, loving relationships, well-behaved children, and time to…
What the Hell is Self-Love Anyway?
Chances are you’ve heard about this magical thing called self-love and have been trying to get some. Self-love is supposed to give us all good stuff: the confidence to set boundaries at work, the motivation to find our life’s purpose, the ability to feel fulfilled and happy alone, and the guts to give our Mr.…
Do Opposites Attract? Projection in Couples
The couple on the couch seemed confused and frustrated. “I think that you are both caught in an exhausting and frustrating pattern,” I said “Carlos, you rely heavily on your intellect and rationality, and Hrishi is very expressive and comfortable in his emotions. I think that his expressiveness is difficult for you to understand, but…
Tell Me Who I Am
As fresh little beings in the world, unable to walk, run, even see far around us, we needed to look to others to help us make sense of the world. Babies instinctively seek out faces around them to get cues as to how they should feel – There was just a loud noise; should I…
Growing Stones: The Process of Becoming Brave
We’ve all heard these misogynistic phrases to describe bravery and inner strength: “Man up,” “Grow some balls,” or “He’s got giant cohones.” According to these phrases, you’ve got to leave your fear out of the picture in order to be a strong man, which not only doesn’t add up– it’s also pretty alienating to have…
Voices
This piece is an exploration of the psychological concept of “parts.” According to the Internal Family Systems model, the mind is made up of myriad subpersonalities. In addition, Carl Jung’s idea of the Collective Unconscious suggests that beyond our individual unconscious, we possess ancestral memory and experience including archetypes such as “mother,” “teacher,” “hero,” and…
Seeking Forgiveness
In the past few years, as I have worked more and more with couples in therapy, I have become interested in the notion of forgiveness. How exactly does someone truly release the hurt caused by another and begin to trust again? In all honesty, the way I had been exposed to forgiveness turned me off.…
Social Media Self-Care: Setting Boundaries on Facebook
I admit it. I get a lot of my news from social media. I’m not just talking about the latest in cuddly animal videos (though my feed is certainly at the cutting edge of documenting the hilarious antics of our fuzzy friends). I truly mean that a significant portion of what I read and watch…
Silence, Privilege, and Pain
I learned about the Pulse massacre in Orlando slowly. I admit, the words “shooting in a nightclub in Orlando” didn’t sound, at first pass, like anything other than another depressing tidbit in the news. It took me a few days to understand the depth and horror of the event. As the details trickled into my…
Trusting Love on Huffington Post This Week
If this time in history is a Tower of Babel, with twenty contradictory perspectives being dumped into your Facebook feed or cable channels daily, it only stands as a magnification of the human dilemma of what is true, trustworthy, and what is to be believed. We are deluged in perspectives, externally from media, family, culture,…
Taking Responsibility for our Future Selves
We’re going to start here by pinching a concept from the field of economics, being, “Cost externalizing”. This is a term that describes how a business maximizes its profits by off-loading indirect costs and forcing negative effects to a third party. For example, when a chemical plant pours its industrial waste into the river next…